Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Is there a pangramic palindrome?

Pangrams are sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet.
The classic is

The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.

(NOTE- I had jumped but a reader corrected it to jumps)
There are more
here.

Palindromes are words, phrases, sentences, or even longer that
are the same backwards as forward.
See
here
for history and some examples.
Weird Al has an entire song that is just palindromes which is titled
bob.
(Its the 14th best Bob Dylan satire of all time:
See here
which has a pointer to a ranked list.)

BUT here is my question: are there any sentences that are BOTH Pangrams
AND Palindromes? I really want to ask are there any in English that are not
too contrived. However, seaching the web I couldn't find any at all!!
So I'll be happy to find any in any language.

Most sufficiently long palindromes (and there are many, see the first ) will contain all letters, one would expect. A more interesting question would be whether there are any short "pangramic palindrome". Clearly it must have at least 51 letters, but how short can it be made?